Meet Lynda.  From her impeccable seamstress skills to her next-level organisation - she keeps our Feather & Oak ship sailing smoothly.  Join Lynda on the blog as she begins planning & building her next family home - sharing her valuable knowledge along the way so you can rest assured you are well prepared, educated & inspired on your personal building venture.

Global Spirit

Our first love is European.  The French and Italian villages you stumble across with their charm and stone that has weathered for centuries.  The honest simplicity of Croatia.  The wrought iron balconies and baskets of hanging flowers, the old women watching life go by – I will be an older woman one day, I want a Juliette balcony!  I will refrain however from emptying my slops out over the balcony.

Earthy Tones

This is all closely followed by rich, earthy tones and natural products such as old brick, sandstone, Greystone with white pointing reminiscent of walls and homes centuries old that have weathered into the landscape with the trees around them.  Then we can add a bit of Boho Bohemian and the deep tones of those Persian style rugs and runners.

Renewing The Old

Both of us are a bit re-inventive when it comes to ‘stuff’ we have collected over the year and we like to repurpose as needs arise.  The arrival of chalk paint for me was brilliant – who would have thought such a product would exist? 

As with clothes – soft furnishings can take on a whole new life.  We both swore we would never be in a house that was one light colour throughout – we felt it was too bland and there was not enough soul!  It is amazing how this can change as we mature, but the addition of texture, colour and life from all the things we have accumulated over the years will tell our story on a great backdrop of those neutral walls. 

Survey The Children

As our children are no longer children but young adults, it was incredibly important to get their input into what we were doing.  Essentially, we were moving away from a home they were born in and had grown up around.  It was a base for our family and the only place they had lived in as ‘home’.

So the question was asked,  "What means home to you?" and "What do you really like about the house we currently call home?".  I wanted to gather up all those things and weave them into ‘Home - Round Two'.



Let's Begin
With all of these ideas rolling around in our heads we needed to get the plan on paper and a rural property sold.

This epic journey took two years to complete.  As we moved the last of our possessions from our home of 20 years in 30 degree heat - we thought that this day would have never come.  But come it did and the relief was palpable!

Retrospectively this time was super valuable to get our ideas collated properly and to downsize without the pressure of dumping things that we couldn’t sell.  We made good decisions through the design process and we got what we wanted within the recession planes and site coverage percentages required by council.

We researched claddings, heating and solar systems, building methods, insulation options, flooring choices, landscape possibilities and surfaces.  Off we went to the Home Shows and Exhibitions….we ducked in and around some building sites to see what other people were doing.  We paid for floor plans held at the Council, for homes we quite liked the look of and fitted a small section similar to our own.

We could not afford to use a building company and we had always planned to be hands on and get in amongst it. This approach would save us a shed load of valuable money.  With Covid, job losses and the general state of the country it was very clear this is the route we would be going down – working beside an awesome builder and living, eating and breathing building our new home for at least 6 months.

So, as we are poised to break ground, who would have thought we would have spent close to $15K to get here – some people spend far more.  They engage other professionals and they build a bigger home with more structural engineering required, amongst other things.  We have been very fortunate that the right people have passed over our path at the right time and some of those skilled people are now firm friends.  We have mentally massaged ourselves to get to this point and we will be eternally grateful to those who have helped us get here.

Stay tuned for my next blog, where building commences and I will be diving more into how our planning unfolds and things you need to be aware of when commencing building! 'Til next time,

xx Lynda